


by light of a dying star

by flamboyantgentleman



Category: Norse Mythology, The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: M/M, Post-Avengers, Warning: Loki, if it's not then why are you reading this, is it charming to compare sex to the apocalypse, warning: purple prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-27
Updated: 2012-05-27
Packaged: 2017-11-06 02:15:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/413602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamboyantgentleman/pseuds/flamboyantgentleman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He thinks, at first, that it is seiðr magick that draws him behind the somber iron bars of the silvertongue’s careful cage, seiðr that drives him into the arms of the one he once called <i>brother.</i> They spend the passing of moons entwined like Yggdrasil’s great roots, seeping the silent fate of Urðr’s dark waters with their lips and their tongues and their fingers and their perfect, yielding flesh.</p>
            </blockquote>





	by light of a dying star

**Author's Note:**

> free cookie for whoever can tell me what the actual fuck i just wrote  
> also – important – i’ve included a list of norse terms at the end just to clear things up! give those a look if you’re confused, etc.  
> also also – these events take place **after the avengers movie** , during loki’s subsequent punishment.

_Some say the world will end in fire,_  
 _Some say in ice._  
 _From what I've tasted of desire_  
 _I hold with those who favor fire._  
 _But if it had to perish twice,_  
 _I think I know enough of hate_  
 _To say that for destruction ice_  
 _Is also great_  
 _And would suffice._  
  


-Robert Frost

 

****

. . .

 

_They stand like statues in the Jötunn twilight, feeling the cold winter wind breathe dark spells against their backs. It is a cold not only of the lips and fingers but of the bones, of the heart, casting long shadows over the land and slipping deep into the soul._

_Thor feels his own soul awash with it, numbed by the silent certainty of death as he gazes over the cliff’s edge. Another step – only minutes ago, when he had been chasing a feral bilgesnipe – and he would be descending already into the primordial mists of Hel. And next to him, fingers curled in innate fear at the swirling abyss, stands Hogun, his eyes shimmering with a strange, dark light._

_“Do you hear it?” Hogun says, speaking in the whisper of a man whose words are few and potent._

_They cock their ears, hearing only the shriek of the wind on the far plains._

_Hogun smiles then, a smile that is cold and afraid and wrought with the sharp daggers of anticipation. In it Thor can see the end of all things, the shimmering starlight of yesterday and tomorrow broken into a hundred glittering shards._

_Hogun beckons, fingers blue in the fading light._

_“It calls to us.”_

 

****

. . .

 

A thousands sunsets pass and Thor comes to understand Hogun’s words, learns to bide the feral call slipping smooth across his gilded bones. Wars are fought and won, and it makes itself known to him as his brother’s sentence rings out into the bright halls of Asgard. A turn of the moon for each life lost, a lick of the whip for each drop of Æsir blood spilt – and yet, the echoes are but a word. Still the strange call runs, trembling, along his spine in sleep and wake alike, calling a name that is forever on the tip of his tongue.

_Loki._

He thinks, at first, that it is seiðr magick that draws him behind the somber iron bars of the silvertongue’s careful cage, seiðr that drives him into the arms of the one he once called _brother._ They spend the passing of moons entwined like Yggdrasil’s great roots, seeping the silent fate of Urðr’s dark waters with their lips and their tongues and their fingers and their perfect, yielding flesh.

The world begins to crumble around him, and with each visit he is born anew by the quicksilver song of a caged bird. He thinks of Hogun’s smile on the edge of the cliff, tracing his own reflection with steady fingers and feeling them spell the end of all things. They betray him not – he has lived Ragnarök a million times in Loki’s embrace, everything that ever was and ever will be beating out a steady pulse against the warm, pale body beneath him.

And tonight, he will die another death in the dungeons beneath his golden kingdom. He waves the guards away with few pleasantries, feeling the supple iron work around him, bind him into the cage with all of the spells and charms Odin concocted to keep his sly, silvertongued prisoner from escaping. It is dark save for the floating flame, blue like the eyes that watch him, flickering as he approaches.

Loki is beautiful in the firelight, his pale, slender face cast in soft glow and gentle shadow, all supple curves against his sharp charm. Together they form something sensual, as lovely as it is cold – it is ice, smooth and glittering and dangerous.

Loki is ice, Loki is hatred – he hates so intensely, so passionately, that Thor thinks it can only be love.

For all his brutishness, he can feel everything perfectly here between them, as if all the world were condensed into the sensations of _cold_ and _warm_ and _hate_ and _desire_ that pass, shuddering, beneath his skin.

“ _Brother,_ ” Loki breathes, and it is like a prayer on his lips – sacred, terrible, slipping somewhere into Thor’s chest and curling there.

When Thor touches him it is hesitant, careful, as if he were touching something delicate and beautiful. He pretends not to see the broken soul beneath his fingertips, pretends for his brother’s sake not to feel the barren loneliness in the way Loki moves to kiss his wrist.

It is wanting, _needing_ , tender in a way that is both more and less than loving.

“Loki,” he says, and there is anticipation slicing the balmy, crushing velvet of his voice.

Loki shifts towards him, neck exposed to the soft firelight. “You came.”

He wraps his arms around his brother with leonine warmth, feeling as if he is swaying at the top of an impossibly large cliff. “I always come.” It is soft, and wholly him.

“You come every night—,“ and suddenly Loki is upon him, moving with a serpentine grace that he so admires, “—and every night I give you the world.”

Thor trembles with fear and desire, feeling the turn of a thousand worlds beneath his feet.

Loki’s cool finger traces the broad, masculine curve of Thor’s jaw, lips at his ear. “Where is it, brother mine, that you take it when you are done with me?”

Thor ponders a moment, never one with poetry in the way that his brother was. He takes Loki’s fingers in his own, presses them against the soft rhythm of his heart. “Here,” he says finally, “I keep it here.”

Loki laughs, and it is silver and beautiful and wicked. “You are a greedy boy,” he chides silkenly, “to keep my gifts from the halls of your golden kingdom.”

The last words are like venom, echoing ice.

Thor draws from himself a kindling warmth, kissing it into the curve of Loki’s neck. If his brother is ice, then fire so he must be – wrought with desire and passion, waxing bright against the turn of a thousand white-hot suns.

“Think not of the Æsir tonight, Loki,” he soothes, lips brushing against his brother’s milk-pale skin with each word. “Think only of me.”

Loki relaxes into him with a sigh, and Thor sees the ferocity of a tensing snake slipping through the cracks in the floor. “You are Æsir, you fool,” he says, and kisses him.

Loki tastes of starlight, of the eternal atoms that bind Jötunn to human to Æsir, and it reminds him of forever.

He kisses back, rough palms smoothing away the clothes that keep him from eternity, and he can feel desire curl low in his stomach as deep and as hot as the fires of Múspellsheimr. Loki mewls and arches into his touch, and he can hear echoed there the battlesong of Gjallarhorn that marks the end of all things.

They pull back, arch into one another again, slipping into a dance of sin and sensuality that feels as old as time itself. Thor breathes in ice and out fire, hot against his brother’s skin; he marks him with tongue and teeth, taking the world from him and watching it shatter into the abyss. He can see in Loki’s eyes reflected the bloodshed of a million stardeaths and feel in his touch the sting of the great winter Fimbulvetr, and when he trembles for Thor it is like the shuddering branches of Yggdrasil in the throes of a final battle. And beneath the life-tree, Urðr’s Well, spilling forth fate incarnate to bind them to one another by flesh and soul.

Thor enters him slowly, torturously, feeling Loki’s fingernails along his back loose the pure, scarlet blood of the Æsir. They fuck like they once fought, fire and ice dancing on their tongues and in their eyes, and all the worlds breathe out a final battle cry as they slip deep into the very essence of one another. Loki pants against him, wrought with sex and magick and a tarnished, twisting love, his body perfect and pliant beneath Thor. There is call to war in the curve of his neck, in the pale distance of his back that stretches forth like a battlefield – and Thor, for all his bellicose vitality, breathes a warrior’s warmth along the cold blue of his brother’s arching veins.

He throws back his head and moans a million spilled curses at Loki’s ministrations, supernova star-death splitting in searing rivulets down his spine, and there is little else he can do than be ensorcelled by the feeling of his brother’s fingers fluttering sensual against his skin. He feels as if he is falling, tumbling from the edge of a great, monstrous precipice into the greater mystery of forever, and the curses burn like prayers on his lips.

He rocks deep inside of Loki, _deeper_ , fighting now for the end of all things in his brother’s desperate grasp. They are a panting, swearing, writhing, perfect _nothingness_ , the space between their lips as black and as jumbled as the newness of an untamed universe, and he can feel between them the hot flame of release burning eager on their flesh.

“ _Brother_ —,” he cries, and it is like a prayer on his lips – sacred, terrible, born into the death of eternity.

“ _Brother._ ” Again, and Thor moves against Loki in the aftermath of the universe, pressing a kiss to his eyelids and feeling the shuddering of a great life-tree reborn in pale starlight.

“Brother—.” He does not know who says it now, or perhaps if their voices are one. A breath, an affirmation. “Brother.”

They are languid, spent, born anew of the blood and beauty of a million newborn stars. Thor moves his mouth against Loki’s neck, lips brushing the skin as slow and as tender as a million-year lover. He knows many lives besides this, and yet all of them seem of a single great truth forever tumbling into the sure silence of his brother’s silver grasp.

Here in the joining of fire and ice, he thinks, is the beginning of all things.

**Author's Note:**

> list of terms (in the order in which they appear)!  
> just to clarify, i am in no way an expert in norse mythology and most of what i know comes from reading wikipedia when i should be working
> 
> **seiðr** – a form of sorcery practiced in Norse society  
>  **Urðr (Urðr’s Well)** – a well beneath one of Yggrdrasil’s three roots; associated with fate  
>  **Ragnarök** – a foretold series of apocalyptic events; known as the death of the gods  
>  **Múspellsheimr** – realm of the fire Jötunn; a land of fire  
>  **Gjallarhorn** – a horn blown by the god Heimdallr at the onset of Ragnarök  
>  **Fimbulvetr** – the harsh winter that precedes Ragnarök


End file.
